Hi folks… Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you’re all enjoying a yummy turkey dinner in honour of the day (Canadian; the Americans’ is coming). We’ve had another fun day at the boat yard… it’s about 95 degrees inside the boat (where Kathy works) and that’s with fans running and all windows open as well as the hatches. But, fear not. You do actually get fairly used to it… and it’s not too bad as long as you keep on drinking (water :-).
You’re probably wondering about the “stranger than fiction” so I’ll just get right into telling you. One of the things I did today was to remove the (decal) name of Shannon’s Spirit in preparation for replacing it with one of a different font; one you could read from farther away that 10 feet! The first was very nice, just not effective… so off it has come. The newer one should be much easier to read from a distance. When you’re sailing by our anchorage we want you to be able to look through your binos and say “hey, there’s SSpirit” not “oh look, it’s another Catalina 34”. If the name isn’t clear enough for you, then the big green shamrocks (one on each side of the bow) should be a dead give away. Anyway, there I was up the ladder with my heat gun sweating and scraping away.. when I couldn’t help but notice that I could see the outlines and shadows of previous names (we’d put our decal right on top of the old ones). I knew her previous name was Wild Goose, but I didn’t know any names before that. And, for the first time, I could actually make out the outline of the name… are you ready…. I almost fell off the ladder!! Her (possibly original) name was… Lady Carolyn. I kid you not. It’s even spelled the same as my name. I’ve put a call into a fellow I know with the Catalina association to see if he knows of her history… but oh my, what a surprise that was.
So that’s the ‘stranger than fiction” story. The rest of our update is that between us we worked our butts off, sweated out quarts of drinking water, and managed to get to the end of the day wondering if we’d accomplished much. But, of course, we had! No photos today but Kathy has indeed spent hours bonding with SSpirit’s electrical system(s) and making adjustments as required and where possible. She’s meeting with an electrician on Wednesday in order to discuss and plan for the more technical aspects of what must be done and so her work today will be very valuable in providing a solid platform from which to move forward. Me? Well I dabbled didn’t I. I removed a bit here, and added a bit there. Studied the raw water intake for the engine; a system I intend to adjust. And, I also spent some time wrestling with bins in our tin roofed, stuffed to the ceiling, storage locker… looking for bits and pieces each of us need for our projects.
Probably the only really bad news I have is that we may have forgotten the coffee cone!!!! That is not good news as all four of us (Sue and John arrive on Wednesday) love our coffee and the system we use on the boat depends on one of those #4 Melitta coffee cones. I’ve gone through every bin we have down here and, if I had to say, I think we left it in the trailer :-( So our McGuivor genes are busily employed working up ideas for creating a cone to hold the hundreds of paper filters (which we DO have). I feel certain we’ll have perfected some invention within the next couple of days… however, ideas are always welcome.
That’s pretty much it for today…. Hope you are all well and not too over-stuffed from turkey, dressing, gravy, mashed potatoes, brussel sprouts, yams, small sweet peas, oh, and pumpkin pie. Ooh we miss our turkey dinners! So, that’s it. Take care everyone… adios, CJ and K (and PS)
